The Grand Array

Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit

A rare collection of daring essays about science, the arts, and spirituality

The Grand Array is a stunning collection of essays by acclaimed poet Pattiann Rogers. Written over a span of twenty-five years, these essays—and three interviews—show Rogers daringly yet delicately laying out her vision of the essential unity and interdependence of science, spirituality, the arts, and the sensual experience of the physical world. Composed in an anecdotal and lyrical—but never dogmatic—style, The Grand Array celebrates human existence and questions many basic concepts about nature, god, and the importance of faith. Rogers’s message is celebratory und unifying—and as such it’s particularly relevant in today’s fractured world. She calls on readers to understand and move beyond the limitations of their knowledge in order to embrace the vastness of the cosmos and the place of humans in its “grand array.”

From an affectionate portrait of the tenacity and devotion of motherhood, to a rigorous questioning of the suffering and death of innocents, to wrestling with personal spiritual challenges, Rogers asks readers in sophisticated and subtle ways to think outwardly while looking inward. A love of the awe-inspiring but sometimes raw mysteries of nature lies at the heart of her writings.

Praise

“Will reward curious and open-minded readers with a similarly expanded perspective—one filled with as much reverence for the complicated, contradictory nature of human existence as for the unfathomable sweep of the night sky.”
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— Cold Front Magazine

“What a gift! These are remarkable reflections from one of our nation’s finest writers. For anyone interested in the intersection of spirituality, art, and nature this book is to be savored like vintage wine—uplifting and entrancing.”

— Mary Evelyn Tucker

“Pattiann Rogers is a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearances are revealed.”

Pattiann Rogers is the author of more than fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Wayfare, Firekeeper, Generations, and the forthcoming Holy Heathen Rhapsody. She has been widely anthologized and published in the New Yorker, Orion, the Paris Review, Wilderness, the New Republic, and many other journals. She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and five Pushcart Prizes and has been a visiting writer at numerous universities...